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1I wish to consider the consequences for modern literary-historical research that result from the ideas, conceptions, and projects that have come into the world under a variety of names—“esthetic of reception and influence”, “literary history from the reader’s perspective”, “the poetics of reception”, research into “norms of reading” or “styles of reception”. All these, however, come down to a couple of shared theses, which have already become rather banal. The fact that those theses can be rendered banal, certainly makes it more difficult to realise to what extent they have managed, in the course of a few years, to re-orient our understanding of what the tasks and object(s) of literary history are, casting doubt on the methodological model of the discipline, a model that until recently seemed deserving of unconditional trust. This does not, of course, mean that the general practice of literary historiography has undergone any radical changes. It is well known that the evolution of methodological partialities, mainly indicated by programmatic declarations, and the common prose of research that leads to contributions to journals, studies, and systematizing text books, etc., are not temporally convergent series. The problem here, however, is that the expectations connected with that practice have changed, that a new standard of the issue has been formulated and practice needs to master the issue, and, thus, also master the horizon of aspiration toward which it tends—but they have changed more or less slowly.

2 I would set out as follows the few theses that began the process of methodological reorientation in today’s literary history.

3 The first of these touches on the role that the receiver’s authorial hypothesis plays in the internal order of a text. This constitutes one of the main determinants of the organization of semantic material. This hypothesis may be of varying character: it is either schematically sketched out or rendered in detail; it posits the features of the desired reader, or, contrariwise, the rejected and deprecated reader; it formulates this reader as a comparatively free partner in a “dialog” or foresees for that reader a purely receptive position, etc. Irrespective of the shape of that thesis, it is always placed in the same location within the scope of the work: it constitutes a reference system for the author’s communicative initiative. The introduction of this hypothesis relativises and directs the plan and purpose of the work; it sets out a framework that limits the creator’s actions; and, in any case, the creator, him/herself only being someone making an utterance in respect of someone, becomes thus someone defined within the order of the message.

4 The second thesis proclaims that the imagined (posited, presumed, required, etc.) receiver, who constitutes a necessary determinant of the author’s communicative action, refers—like almost everything in a text—beyond the text: to models of reading behavior widely spread within the reading public “here and now”, and to that public’s attachments, expectations, and established methods of reading. It is a matter of the public to which the author him/herself belongs (or belonged). The author knows its characteristic points of view, shares its preferences and prejudices, or contests them. Irrespective of to what extent the receiver posited by a work positively or conflictually matches the reader roles and positions promoted in this historically, geographically, and socially defined public, the receiver is actually always a construct that is comprehensible only in reference to those roles and positions.

5 It is to this construct, above all, that a text owes its communicative force—its ability to travel along the circuit tracks that are appropriate to the literary life within which the creator operates (or operated). The authorial hypothesis as regards the receiver determines the natural tendency of the text toward this or that circuit; it accommodates it more or less successfully in the existing order of experiences of literary and culturally varying environments and reading circles. The manner in which it is received by its first—maternal—public, and, thus, understood, interpreted, valorised, possibly seen as illegible, rejected or simply ignored—this manner establishes its original semantics. In other words (which comes to the same thing), it marks the beginning of its literary-historical existence.

6 However (and this is the next thesis that is important for the current of interests that we are considering, the encounter of the text with this first public is by no means identical with an immobilization of its semantics against which there can be no appeal and, thus, with the determining of its fate. When the work passes—in time and space—through publics that are different from the maternal one, its original semantics undergoes transformations, including ones that go very far indeed. Standing before changing contexts of reception—changing literary cultures, norms of reading, funds of experience and expectation—the text becomes overgrown with readings and interpretations, which—whether one likes it or not—accompany its further fates among readers. In fact, to say they accompany them is to put it too mildly; they often envelope it in a thick and impenetrable wrapping. Every environment and generation deposits on it a layer of its reading experiences. The history of the semantic actualization of a work in readings is a process that frequently takes a capricious course, in which continuations and disruptions of continuity interweave, along with a stubborn endurance of certain ways of reading, and re-interpretations of previously fixed interpretations. Environmentally and historically variegated types of reception of the same work may successively add up, but they can also mutually exclude and invalidate each other.

7 Thus, for the proponents of a program of literary-historical research, the hypotheses of which I will recall here as concisely as possible, a work simply cannot be thought of as an autonomous entity in terms of this process. Placed outside the multiverse of its readers, it would be seen to be drained of any meaning at all, and, at the same time, cast out from history. Its kingdom would, indeed, not be of this world. The reception of a work, the meaning of a work, and the historicity of a work, these are in this understanding three aspects of one phenomenon, and the fact that they are considered in this particular combination is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of this conception. The soundness of another way of dealing with the text is not undermined by this—for example, as a product linked with the authorial subject and the literary system, within the circuit of which he/she operated (that is, according to the obtaining norms or going beyond them more or less resolutely). To question this idea would be something incomprehensible. The conception of a work as a flat surface on which readings are laid down in layers and systematised, constitutes in relation to this idea a complementary, and not an alternative, under|standing. This must be vigorously stressed in order to avoid misunder|standing. No one is trying to deny that a work owes an important part of its meaning to the restrictions that mark out a writer’s language, to the rules of the literary sending code. But in order for this meaning to become complete, the reader (to paraphrase Barthes here) has to address the work—with his/her reading, which thrusts the work within the limits of a semantic system sometimes very distant from an initial code. It is only this meeting of both parts of the work’s “meaning” that constitutes the real object of literary-historical investigation. But also every time the scenery of this meeting. The reader—as literary history is interested in him/her—is not innocent and defenseless in relation to the work; he/she approaches the text as someone that has been shaped by his/her reading experiences hitherto, able to read “as one should”, that is, in accord with the standards of a defined literary culture. But the work, too, when it approaches to the receiver, is not innocent either at all; it is replete with meanings ascribed to it by its reading hitherto, enslaved by explications and adjudications, included in classifications and hierarchies of values. The work is read, and in it—unavoidably—the residue of traces of former readings by others.

8 It would be unacceptable arrogance to maintain that only today’s literary knowledge discovered and respected the issue of reception and the receiver. At its heart, research into the reception of works and writers at different times and in different environments has belonged to the recognised field of interest of academic literary studies from the time of the Positivists. This was not just a matter of a more or less chaotic recording of evidences of reading and descriptions of the socio-cultural conditions in which texts circulated and functioned. Of course, this kind of research work predominated; but, in fact, sometimes systematised and theoretically grounded programs of action were built up on top of them—from Hennequin to Vodička. Also, outside literary history sensu stricto—in the fields of the sociology of literature and readership research conducted as a part of book and manuscript studies—there has developed a substantial body of knowledge concerning the mechanisms and channels of the social circuit of works, concerning literary publics, concerning readers’ needs, concerning taste, concerning the popularity of works, concerning variants of literary success, etc., and, thus, concerning phenomena that are of lively interest to literary historians. Here, too, descriptive information has often been accompanied by developed theoretical conceptualizations. One could point, indeed, to an entire series of various ideas that have emerged in the field of esthetics and philosophy of literature (from Aristotelean catharsis to Hegel, and from Hegel to Sartre)—ideas that propose a understanding of a text as an “appeal” or a “dialog”, emphasizing in it what is a hidden or open demand for a reader’s answer, what is a summons to co-operate on the part of receivers, and what is, at the same time, an answer to their summons, longings, and aspirations.

9 Thus, it is not the case that suddenly today the formerly unnoticed matter of reception and the receiver has been perceived. In fact, it was fairly well known already and presented using the most varied of terminologies. However, within the interests of literary history, it lay outside the borders of the main object of research. It might be valued or not; invariably, however, is was located alongside the main subject in a hierarchy. But this subject was composed—in different measures—from three components: the work, the writer’s decisions, and the context (psychological, social, ideological, literary) that explains those decisions and their product. Knowledge about reception, irrespective of the methods used to acquire it, constituted a kind of supplement to this basic whole. Even if it was desirable and valuable, it was not essential; it did not produce the most important consequences for research into the main subject. What is new in the situation today is that the matter of reception has, in a way, penetrated to the center of the object of interest for literary history, and has reorganised its order hitherto. In particular, this last point needs to be stressed, since that penetration does not simply mean an enrichment of the subject up to now, adding one more element to its components, but means rather an entire transformation, as a result of which a hitherto unknown composition of the subject of research has emerged.

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10 Among the various displacements that had to be made in the thinking of literary studies in connection with the above, I would see four as particularly important. I will look at them in turn.

11A. Before our eyes, a clear change is taking place in our manner of seeing the literary historical process. The history of literature, for which the basic units are works, writers’ individual personalities, and systems of creation, is inclined to see in the process of literary history, above all, sequences of innovation, fractures, concussions, unexpected intrusions of originality, transformations of paradigms (of genre, theme, style, ideology), and disruptions of continuity, etc. However if we introduce reading into the field of interest, along with the reader, norms of reading, and the literary public, this does justice a completely different vision of literary-historical process: one in which continuity and endurance are dominant. It is not a history of revolutions, coup d’états, audacious acts of defiance of norms, but, above all, a history of the stabilization of custom, the stub|born maintenance of already developed models, conventions that exist by force of inertia, and slow changes. Of course, it would be difficult to insist that this history is quite without an element of event (événement). After all, we do meet with the textual fixing of individual readings. Among these are some highly spectacular ones, clearly separating themselves from any background. And there are readings that violently contest standards and systems of reading, undertaken by innovator-readers (more of these below). This is true. However, such events that are evident to the historian rarely emerge onto the surface of this history—like individual islets, or at best small archipelagoes. In its main current, this history moves silently. Predominantly, its substance of event has no individualised consolidations that could tell us something more detailed about it in any immediate fashion. This history is accessible only via indirect evidences, which are not always credible and sufficiently eloquent, and, thus, are the object of hypotheses, surmises, and statistical reconstructions. In any case, we are only able to reach the level of potential schemas defining what in reading events is multiple, repeatable, serial; with regard to events sensu stricto, that is individual events, we are in a position to say no more of them than that they must have occurred. In a word, if the history of creative acts and works recalls—in its main story line—a sequence of dramatic scenes, then the history of reading and receivers can be compared to a roman fleuve, in which more important than what happened is what was happening (continually). In both cases, we are dealing with different rhythms of evolution, indicating differing periodizations of literary-historical process. It is also necessary to look afresh at the issue of censorship, nodal points, and segments within the literary-historical process. The temporal range of periods and currents, marked out by transformations of the types of public and styles of reception that match them, will look quite different from the range of those periods and currents marked out through publication dates of break-through works, significant works, masterpieces, and epigone texts.

12B. The very idea of the historicity of a work becomes complicated. That historicity is first understood as a hitching of a work to the situation that is created by a specific phase in the writer’s biography, a moment in the evolution of the collective consciousness of the environment, the state of the literary system (of tradition) that gives an opportunity for a given initiative on the part of a writer, a collection of writers’ initiatives related to this initiative, that is growing out of analogical aims (for example, the community of belonging to a current, a poetics, a literary school), and, finally, the stage of literary life on which the writer plays his/her role. The hitching of a work to a situation defined by these particular equiponderant factors would consist of each of the mentioned points of reference being, as it were, a closure of a certain sequence of experiences, the final link in a series, the solution of a problem, an answer to expectations, and an energetic abandonment of a state of potentiality. The work’s historicity is a connection with all that to which it marks closure: it crowns some phase in the creator’s biography; as the textual articulation of an idea it defeats (momentarily) the indefiniteness and scattering of ideas wheeling in the collective consciousness; it constitutes an actualization and reinterpretation of the existing norms and models of a tradition (for example, of genre); it supplements a given family of contemporary works with a writerly solu|tion that has hitherto been absent from it. It takes a hitherto unoccupied place within a certain configuration of texts; its successful or less successful circulation within its maternal public is a consequence of the degree to which the creator has been able to place him/herself within the established order of literary life, to accept the communicative rituals that obtain here, and to demonstrate the ability to conduct an effective game with the widely distributed needs of readers.

13 Thus, the homeland of a work would be its anteriority. If we wish to understand it as a historical phenomenon, we should persistently aim at a reconstruction of the situation which made possible its unexpected appearance in the field of literary utterances.

14 The issue of reception and the receiver contributes to this understand|ing of a work’s historicity—it adds another understanding of this category. To develop my earlier metaphor, one should say that historicity is here, in fact, identified with an unhitching of the work from the situation that initially “conditioned” it, and with its unfettered floating toward unknown fates. Where in the former metaphor one sees in it a closure or circum|scription of a certain sequence of experiences, here it is the other way round: it delights the imagination of the scholar as a collection of possibilities that are the start of a whole series of eventualities, which will take place in wholly new and unforeseeable situations. The work’s historicity—from this perspective—is its opportunity to exist and to function beyond the primary aggregate of equiponderant factors, and, thus (which comes to the same thing), its ability to join differing aggregates of equiponderants. Breaking away from the writer’s biography, it begins its history in the uncountable biographies of its readers; is it not so that every one of its readings is a fragment of someone’s biography, and through that, of the biography of generations and environments? Falling free of the determining entanglements of the collective consciousness of a given time and place, it becomes progressively saturated with the ideological contents of other places and times. Having defined itself in relation to an established system of tradition, it now finds itself within a traditional repertoire, co-creating a system of references or later initiatives by writers. In its own time, entering into an ensemble of related works, it is later isolated and becomes defenseless in the face of the most diverse affiliations and allocations—made according to criteria that no one could have previously imagined. Having found itself outside its own configuration of literary life, which foresaw for it well-defined tracks of social circulation and well-defined zones of operation, it may later be subject—in the changing scenographies of literary communication—to multiple func|tional readjustments: in any case, the text at first designed for a circle of the writer’s friends and living its life in manuscript circulation, later becomes a canonical text of a national literature, reproduced in mass editions; the innovative excess rejected by contemporaries and quickly forgotten by them, in another period gets onto the list of readings for schools; plebian works in time enter the repertoire of elite literature; in turn, works pitched at an elevated style move aside to the level of examples of kitsch.

15 In a word: from the point of view sketched out above, the work is not so much an answer as a question—one that is constantly expecting new answers. It is not so much a definitive solution, as a problem to be solved (in various ways). It is not so much an actualization as a potential, one that requires every time an actualization from reception.

16 The first conception of historicity recognises as the work’s primary value its originality, while in the second conception, it is the work’s productivity. Originality is the fracture that the work causes in a petrified literary system by its own unprecedented quality. It is not foreseen by current norms and taxonomies of written creation; from the point of view of the widely promulgated standards of expectations, it reveals itself as a deviant adjustment, peculiarly and weirdly ill-suited to the existing world of texts. Its entire originality, however, is one and for all and irrevocably overgrown with this historically defined amalgam of circumstances: it exists only in contradiction of the norms that it avoids or which it opposes. It constitutes a tangible quality of a work exclusively in relation this unique hic et nunc in the literary-historical process. The work is original only once—in its native synchrony: later, this property may be at most recalled, and it cannot be renewed or reanimated. But also—what befell the work then is never lost; even the heaviest of experiences in history (and the severest of these is to be forgotten) actually retains its vanished originality. However, productivity is a property of work that manifests itself in instalments—in diachronic extension. To the extent that we can assert that productivity exists, to that degree it is renewable, that is, capable of offering nourishment in changing socio-literary conjunctures. The productivity of a text is attested by the breadth and multiplicity of the reactions that it has evoked in the course of the literary-historical process. When I speak of reactions to a work, I am thinking not only of affirming or polemical references to it in other works, allusions, parodic replicas, exploitation of its thematic material, or adopting compositional or stylistic solutions that it introduced, but also ways of understanding and evaluating it, the languages of critical interpretation, which it served as an object, and the public’s aspirations and demands, which it was able to satisfy or irritate. The broader, denser, and more enduring the zone of reaction that the literary historian can assign to a given work, and the more variegated (internally dramatised) it is, then the higher he/she will be inclined to estimate the productivity of that work. If the measure of originality is the fracture occasioned by the work in the existing literary system, then the measure of productivity is the “turnover” that accompanies its subsequent fate. These are not mutually exclusive values, although, of course, there exist works that are extremely original but that have a low degree of productivity, and vice-versa. Perhaps the most important aspect of a so-called masterpiece is an exceptionally fortunate interdependence of both these values.

17 The research for which the first conception of historicity is the guiding light attempts in every case to grasp that state of the work in which it is semantically bedded down: its meaning is defined and completely (or at least predominantly) explicable in its contextual assignment. However, if we include the second of these conceptions, the object of interest becomes a work that is semantically not finalised, without one meaning, or even one polysemy, open continually to new semantic valuations and revaluations, which intervene in it along with a progressive process of interpretative readings. If we wish to be consistent, then we ought not to consider any one of the types of reading encountered in this process as more adequate or definitive than any others. Not only does the reception of a work by its first—maternal—public lose its privileged position, but even what was until recently still seen as the guarantee of the work’s meaning—that is the writer’s intention (inasmuch as the scholar has access to it). This intension now appears simply as one of many reading events hitched to the work, and not as a measure defining the appropriateness of the work’s understanding and formulation. It marks out one of the possible semantic cross-sections of the message—analogical to all other kinds of reading that it encounters in the course of its functioning. All this together makes one inclined to abandon the effort that could lead the literary historian to discover a manner of reading and interpretation that would be most appropriate to a given work, hitting its most essential and unshakable meaning, a manner of reading that reveals the work’s primary function. If a literary historian says “A”, that means advancing the thesis that the work’s receptibility belongs to the essence of that work, then he/she cannot forget the other letters of the alphabet: the work is not just capable of reception, but is actually received, and, indeed, it is in those receptions that the meaning and function of the work are determined.

18 It is more or less in this way that one can understand the idea expressed above that the issue of reception and the receiver has complicated the notion of a work’s historicity. However, for all that, it is necessary most forcibly to indicate that both the conceptions sketched out here are not mutually competitive; the deal with the matter from different locations of the text within the process of literary evolution. Therefore, neither of them should be privileged at the cost of the other, since, centrally, each one complements the other.

19 C. There is no doubt that the matter of reception and the receiver has also complicated current understandings of the morphology of the literary text. Of course, when we say this, we should indicate the point of departure in relation to which these understandings appear to be more complicated. We can basically take this point of departure to be the conception of the organization/structure of the work that established itself under the influence of the ideas of Roman Ingarden, and also the conception that one is tempted to see as in accordance with the early phase of structural literary studies. From both these conceptions—perhaps the most characteristic of the ergo-centric current, although none the less quite different in many aspects—there emerges an image of a work as a structure belonging to no one and at rest, a structure that by its lofty identity contradicts both its genesis, and also its readerly designation. Within literary studies, the departure from this kind of understanding was a double-acting process.

20 The first departure was connected with adopting a model of the work in which the elements refer not just mutually to each other and to the whole that comprises them (in a layered horizontal order, and in a vertical, inter-layer order), but, beyond that, to the appropriate classes of elements located outside the work—in the system of literary tradition. Viewing the components of a message as being chosen from certain repertoires that lie in the creator’s field of vision, and perceiving beyond that what is placed within the text, that is, norms and paradigms of a tradition—in other words, recognizing the work’s genotype beyond its phenotype—let us project the completed work against the background of the possibilities rejected, denied, or neglected in it. In this way, the actualised work reveals its self-actualization among multifarious chances of “being-other-than-it-came-to-be”. We restore to the completed message, as it were, the dynamism of its original creation/emergence, the decision process as a result of which it was formed and shaped. However, this decision process refers, of course, to the person of the sender, the author. Otherwise, it would be inconceivable. Thus, we have the following sequence of implications: the finished text implies the existence of its own potential within tradition; further, the reference of the text to tradition implies the existence of a decision process that coordinates and links both these realities; and finally, the decision process implies its subject. We can find this kind of chain of implications at the roots of the main research concepts of today’s historical poetics. It is mainly to its experiences that we owe the familiarity with the view that historicity and subjectivity are dimensions or aspects of the very structure of a text, and not exclusively elements of the context that expounds them.

21 However, with regard to the point of view of this article, a second step that separates us from the concept of a work’s structure as belonging to no one and at rest, is more deserving of our attention. To put it at its most general, this step can be seen in all undertakings that aim to define and describe the internal textual communicative situation, but, however, in particular the manner of existence within a text of an established, implied, or virtual (for it has many names) receiver. I do not wish to go into the subtleties of this range of issues, which have frequently been presented and discussed. I wish only to note that the category of the virtual receiver certainly constitutes a destructive factor within the structural model of a work: it causes confusion in the stratified order, because it cannot be ascribed to any level of the work’s organization. What is the most important, however, is that it deprives the work of its fundamental quality—its closedness. However one wishes to formulate the concept of the virtual receiver, carefully and firmly underlining its internal textual existence, it is unavoidably a matter of a component through which the external—the so-called factual reception situation—has an opportunity to squeeze into the interior of the work. It is a “weak link” in the structure: that virtual receiver represents—as we know—something that can be called a program or script of a successful reading, the authorial project of appropriate decoding operations, a set of instructions for every reader to identify and adopt the “point of view” set out for him/her, which will make it possible to master the work’s correct meaning. In one way or another, the reader must in his/her reading solve this task set out in the text, irrespective of the degree to which his/her cultural-literary equipment distances him/her from the outline of the virtual receiver.

22 Research into the text-internal communicative situation fits in well with a literary history that places phenomena of reception in the fore|ground. Such research reformulates conceptions about the organization of a work in such a way that it adapts reception to what can generally be seen as an individual unit of this kind of history. Above all, the research made one aware (and this is its main theoretical value) that the morphology of a work embraces not only what is structural order, but also what makes it more similar to a field than to an organization. Seen as a structure it appears to us under the aspect of its object status and stability; seen as a field it appears under the aspect of its incompletion, its—bi-partite—subjective status, and what goes along with that, its susceptibility to the interventions of those who whenever and however will perform the communicative role of the receiver that is projected in the work. Structure makes of the work a thing that is capable of endurance in the historical process; as a field, it is capable of life in this process, and, thus, of being subjected to transformations.

23 As in the previous point, it is necessary to insist here that both aspects require linked relativisation, above all, because they are opposed to each other. Each is quite indispensable to the other. We have no other access to the structure of a text than such that makes us become every time one of the forces that marks out its field. But, in turn, we are only able to grasp the field of possible variability of a work in so far as it appears against a background of a stable construction. Neither of these aspects takes logical precedence over the other; they are simultaneous and mutually conditioning.

24 D. Finally, it is necessary to indicate that the issue of reception and the receiver compels the literary historian him/herself to become conscious afresh of his/her own position—as a researcher—vis-à-vis the texts that he/she analyzes and explicates. Recognizing readerly operations as an integral component of the object with which he/she is concerned, he/she can no longer pretend that he/she exists at some difficult to define distance from the object, beyond the determinants that define the reader’s position, in a safe sphere of Knowledge, where interpretative work is not hampered by error, limitation, or prejudice. He/she begins to be conscious that the tools at his/her disposal, research procedures, and measures of value, are things that are irredeemably relative, subject to the pressure of the literary culture of the environment in which the historian acquired his/her education and skills. He/she begins to be conscious that, when speaking of works, he/she is fundamentally speaking to them (to paraphrase Barthes’s formula once more) in the name of that very literary culture and of those that employ it. He/she begins to be aware that he/she is conducting a dialog with texts as someone located within a network of communicative roles and positions that are appropriate to the public of a defined place and time. He/she begins to be aware that by the very research initiative, he/she joins a historical procession of readings of a work—and close, at a given moment, a whole sequence of readings. And he/she begins to be aware of joining like an actor the spectacle of the literary-historical process.

25 Of course, the role in the community of those who read has certain particular qualities, which should not be overlooked. The literary historian can, in fact, install him/herself in absolutely any phase of a work’s reception—beginning from the stage of the assumed intension of the author. For example, one can ask what Sienkiewicz wanted to say to his contemporaries through his vision of the Cossack wars in With Fire and Sword [Ogniem i mieczem] (Sienkiewicz 1992); but one can also penetrate the understanding of this novel by its first readers. One can be interested—let us accept—in the intellectual principles of that section of the public that Prus represented in his review of Sienkiewicz’s novel; or one can ask what later opinions of Sienkiewicz, those held by Nałkowski or Brzozowski, brought to this text’s semantics; or, which is equally possible, one can ask what way of reading the novel became fixed in school teaching in the inter-war period.

26 When questions like this are asked, the literary historian experimentally enters certain reconstructed communicative situations, which apart from the literary historian no one has to experience. In his/her research work, he/she plays, as it were, passed readings, adopts the points of view and motivations appropriate to them, and locates him/herself within literary cultures that are often distant and alien, an difficult to conceive of in the literary historian’s present. The ability to undertake and conduct such enterprises distinguishes him/her against a background of other types of readerly roles and positions. That is true. However, irrespective of what phase of the historical life of a work the literary historian attempts to join, he/she cannot, of course, invalidate or even suspend the pressure of the literary-cultural standards to which he/she is subject. Nałkowski read and interpreted Sienkiewicz for (and in the name of) an environment of receivers belonging to the liberal-left-wing intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The modern scholar reading Nałkowski reading Sienkiewicz also does this for (and in the name of) his/her own public. In reconstructing old layers of the historical semantics of a text, he/she builds a new layer into it.

27 Until recently, the literary historian behaved as though he/she did not know what he/she was doing. At present, he/she more often wants to reflect on the actual situation in which he/she finds him/herself. What does it matter if one wants finally to perfect the methodology of describing different types of a work’s reception, if one recognises the fact that the work of the literary scholar also belongs to them? So one discovers in oneself the need to reflect on the system of reading that one practices oneself, and on the kind of receivers that are staged by one’s actions. One includes such reflection of oneself into the research object...

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28 I would now like to touch on some issues connected exclusively with the first among the topics dealt with above, and, thus, say a few minor things about the concept of the literary-historical process that ascribed to receiver and reception the importance of constitutive factors.

29 First, one must note that the literary-historian’s interest in these phenomena is not at all reducible to the interests which they carry in readership research in sociology, book and manuscript studies, and pedagogical-psychological research. This is a truism, for sure, but it must be said for two reasons. First, because there are places within the concerns of literary studies where it really does intersect with those kinds of research, which may incline one to suspect that literary studies is in general convergent with them. Second, because in all these contexts there appear many similarly sounding names and terms (“public”, “literary culture”, “reader”, “taste”, etc.), which may suggest that in each of the contexts, the content is the same, when, in fact, we usually are dealing with verbal labels that conceal completely different conceptual constructs.

30 Since I do not wish to engage in a too rigorous demarcation of competences and disciplines, which in any case is usually sterile, I will only say this much—that the literary historian is concerned with the reader’s world to the extent (although I am not saying exclusively to that extent) that one can understand this world as supplementary in relation to the world of literary texts. This formulation is, at the same time, generalised and enigmatic; thus, it is inappropriate to leave it so.

31 We can without great effort define what that world of the reader has to contain within itself. Above all, readers should exist in it, that is, persons in whose life among other occurrences readings of works of belles lettres appear. And these should not be fortuitous or isolated events, but they should be elements of a more or less permanent paradigm of event—recurrent and scattered with a tangible regularity in the stream of the existential activity of a given individual. This person must have at his/her disposal an appropriate potential of will, knowledge, and ability, that will make “cultivated/trained readings” possible, and, thus, the expansion of the configuration of read texts. On every occasion, the fact of reading links the reader with a defined text; this is obvious. Yet, the reader is also linked with other persons, those who in the surrounding environment undertake similar activity, not necessarily in relation to the same text, but, in any case, in relation to texts that are in some respect analogical. Reading is an—individual—engagement with a work, but also a kind of performance played out for those others: it is intended to confirm the individual’s belonging to the community of those who read. The individual reader knows some of them, has heard of others, but is capable only of imagining the existence of the majority of them. The reader could never exchange with them any opinions on texts and reading; but only this collectivity creates for him/her potential conditions for such communicative initiatives. And here we have the second component of the reader’s world: the literary public (that is, an aggregate of varied sub-collectivities—layers, groups, environments, circles). The individual confirms belonging to this or that sector of the public inasmuch as the game with a text, which he/she undertakes every time, is an activity understood against a background of widely spread procedures of reading. Understood does not mean in accord with them; it may be an activity that is not in accord with a stereotype, but it should explain itself then as deviation, defection, or prank. Thus, the individual willingness to read this or that must refer to some standard of taste for texts of a particular type. The individual set of knowledge of literary phenomena cannot be less than a sanctioned minimum; finally, the individual repertoire of the ability to engage with a text must recall (even if negatively) some measure of appropriate engagements. All this together forms the third component of the reader’s world: the system of reading that is supported within a given public.

32 Now I would like to make some comments on what we have called above the world of texts. What does it contain, and what is it like? Like the world of the reader it is, in any case, a reality that is relativised to the “here and now”, seen as a part of some—historical—contemporaneity. And this reality is highly diverse. In part, it could be compared to a systematically arranged and cataloged library. In part, it recalls a lumber room filled in a disorderly fashion with junk, into which no one ventures very frequently. In part, it is a warehouse or an exhibition room, in which are displayed, in the most varied of combinations, objects with the inscription “newly made”—often of unclear use and peculiarly calculated prices. In part, finally, it is presented as a space of incompletion, a haze of possibilities consisting of longings, projects, utopias, aspirations; a sphere of what can be imagined, desired, expected—in any case, characterised by some perceptible lack of existence.

33 So, first, we are dealing with an ordered collection of works from the past, with a set that has the character of a canon: the texts that belong to this are already well located in defined sub-collections, fixed in typological networks, understood in an established fashion, and permanently linked with certain points on scales of values. Second, into play comes a collection of works of the past—utterly deprived, however, of order and hierarchy. The texts that the collection embraces have not managed hitherto to cross the border of the state of order; or once they were in it, but later had their citizenship taken away from them. It is hard to foresee their fate: in a given moment they are texts that are either recognised as antiques or as those the oddity of which is both unclassified and marginal, or they are without an established semantic commentary, or they are considered unworthy of such interpretation; in a word, they are texts that have been left to lie fallow. In the third instance, we are dealing with a collection—similar to the preceding one—that is unordered, made up of texts that are undomesticated in terms of classification, lacking definitive semantic reading, of unfixed or controversial value; however, as opposed to those in the lumber room, these do not at all await their fate in humble fashion: they want to be seen and appreciated, their peripheral existence displeases them, they noisily insist on their place in the literary system, and vigorously threaten its current equilibrium. They are aggressive with the aggression of the present tense, for they represent writing’s truest “today”—they have just come into being and something must be done with them: permit them to come into the center of the city of literature, refuse them right of entry, let them in conditionally, or hold them in disdain. Finally, in the fourth instance, we are confronted with a variety of calls for a desired literature, such a literature as should exist in accordance with certain ideals, postulates that refer to such a literature, and to even more or less concrete visions. This whole sphere of calls, postulates, and visions, built up—although not exclusively so—by critics and writer’s programmatic formulations, can be treated as a future-oriented opposition to the three other classes of texts: in reality, however, this sphere is always an effect of the adoption—allusion or in polemic—of possibilities that are contained implicite in those other classes of text—at present not seen or forgotten.

34 After making these necessary distinctions, I can pass to the most enigmatic element of the formulation that for the literary historian the world of the reader is interesting insofar as it can be grasped as supplementary in relation to the world of literary texts. In this case, what does supplementary mean?

35 To put it most generally: the reading practice of a given public can be described as a process in which texts belonging to the above-mentioned categories are subject to a mixing. As a result of this mixing, a new order emerges, in other words—and it comes to the same thing—a new state of literary tradition, setting out the possibilities and directions for further literary creativity. As one can see from this, we accord readers the role of a factor that dynamises (and at the same time brings order to) the universe of texts. In a way that is almost unnoticeable, we have, thus, changed the point of view that has been preferred in this discussion hitherto. Earlier it was a matter, above all, of the text’s situation in a world of readers; the texts interested us as a place in which varied readings converge and meet, and along with those readings the supply and reserve of experiences for different readers, and—on the macro-level—of different publics. Now it is as if everything is turned round; now it is not a matter of looking at literature from the receiver’s perspective, but of looking at the receiver from the perspective of literature. In this aspect he/she appears to us as a historically defined point for the attachment of many different texts, as a space in which a collection of texts accrues. Considered thus—and it is precisely this aspect that the literary historian must push to the foreground—the receiver is simply the representative of a pyramid (or pyramid-let) of works that he/she has “clocked up”. And ones that are, in any case, possible—in that literary-cultural situation—to “clock up”. The same can be said of whole collectivities of readers. On the territory of every public (and in its ambit—of every level or group), a mountain of texts rises up, the mountain that belongs to it to be climbed in its entirety, and climbed and being climbed in some part. These kinds of stackings and piles of texts have remained hitherto outside the scope of the interests of literary history; so we do not really know how to describe them. But they are—and it is hard to deny this—the most natural literary-historical groupings of works, imposing themselves with a much greater degree of obviousness than the classes of works that correspond, for example, to genres or currents.

36 The practice of readers creates multiple divisions, links, and orderings among the texts that go to make up the mountain that is accessible to readerly practice. It draws a border between the regions of the read and the unread; but within the purlieus of the read it draws lines dividing the readable from the less readable, or even from the quite unreadable. It shapes whole series and configurations of old and new works, confirming thereby traditional taxonomies or by stages departing from them. Widespread variants of readings cause, for example, genre-based mixing of texts. As they move from one genre category into another, individual works, and even whole families of works enter into relations with works with which they were formerly never associated, or simply could not be associated (because these later works did not yet exist). So it is that through receptions, a work is once more embroiled in a network of inter|textual references. Once more—because the author him/herself deter|mined its first entanglement, by placing his/her utterance in a certain environment of others’ utterances, calling them up, imitating them, continuing them, or—contrariwise—repelling them or silencing them. It often happens that these secondary intertextual connections, which are shaped via readings and readers, completely veil the original entanglements of the text (especially of an old text) and shove these—one might say—into a state of retirement. Then only the readings of connoisseurs (exegetes) can restore to the work in a constellation of texts that is now forgotten. It is not just a matter of the new (and continually new) links among texts; along with these, wholes of a higher level intersect and interpenetrate on the level of reception: the literary conventions repre|sented by these texts.

37 Above all, however, it draws attention to what plays out in every contemporary period among the four registers of texts distinguished above. It is the case that readings in this composite universe are conducted as it were in the name of one of these registers, irrespective of whether they are connected with texts belonging to that register, or whether they embrace works from other registers. In this second case, those readings in the name of a register make it possible for receivers to master texts that they do not consider unconditionally close; those readings permit them to add those texts to their own repertoire, to dispose of them, to tame them, or on the other hand, to cast them out from the disorder they have been in till now, and possibly to put them beyond the borders of acceptability.

38 Those readings have the most stabilizing character for which a positive configuration of reference is made up of models of reading that are established in relation to works that make up the systematised canon of a tradition (ones recognised as “classic”). Ways of receiving those very works are generally subject to the slowest of possible changes—which is quite understandable. They are, indeed, borne beyond the register of the texts appropriate to them, and they are treated as universal norms of correct reading—in relation to all texts, even to those that do not yet exist. These norms receive a particular role in situations in which they are confronted with texts from the third register—with “newly made” pieces of contemporary times. Their task is then to make it easy for a given public to encounter texts that have not yet been put in order, to master their indeterminacy and chaos, and to establish to what degree they are domesticable. In a word, they are supposed to minimalise the cognitive dissonance that arises in an encounter with the unknown. Tested principles of understanding, categorisation, and evaluation make it possible immediately to lead some of these works along the royal road to the canon, or at least to lodge them in the vicinity of the canon. They also make it possible to shove others into the lumber-room, which is the most effective way of dealing with dangerous objects or ones that are troublesomely ill-defined. One of the forms of domesticating new texts is a conditional inclusion of them in the canon—as it were, on trial, to see how they fit. The majority fall out of the canon in a short time; the continued presence of others demands, in any case, an even more exact explanation. As an example of this testing mechanism one can point to school reading lists—to the extent that they include works of contem|porary literature.

39 In opposition to stabilizing reading practices based on a canon, there remain all otherwise directed types of reception, which, it is true, are usually weaker and more diffuse. So, for example, the reading activities of writers and the creators of critical programs, and, indeed, of ideologues, implies a direction: from the utopia of the desired literature to all the remaining levels of the available world of texts. Readings so oriented—one can say that they are by definition revisionist and radical—stimulate transformations of the hierarchy within the basic canon, often mark the start of the career of texts hitherto lying inert in the lumber room, and introduce clear differentiations and classifications among contemporary texts. In turn, for critics that follow contemporary literature (as opposed to the creators of critical programs or visionaries) research into that literature will set out criteria and standards for reading older texts. Readings that go in this direction must, of course, lead to the most various incursions both into the canon and the lumber room, and also the movement of texts between both these sectors. After all, it is to the readings of literary scholars that we owe not only the solicitous conservation of the canon, but also—and really quite frequently—the discovery of treasures in the lumber room and their transfer to the canon.

40It has been pointed out above that the history of reading and receivers (viewed from the perspective of literary studies) appears to us to be a history with a substantially reduced element of event (évènement). Neither persons nor individual readings are its basic units, but large and massive wholes, such as, publics, social rituals of reading, and systems and styles of reading. All this is true. However, one must immediately note that the situation of someone who would care to undertake the effort to do research into this history, appears somewhat paradoxical. This is so because the kind of evidences that impose themselves on him/her in the first instance points toward receptions that are—as Stanisław Lem would call them—singular and clearly subjectively relative. It is no surprise that one wants to listen first to what is most audible. How is it possible to organise in an orderly fashion the records that straightforwardly inform the scholar of someone’s reading experiences? Of course, it is necessary to stop and consider them. But it is then extraordinarily difficult to take further steps. How, indeed, can one get through these eloquent records of individual readings to the swollen river of anonymous and silent receivers? Can one recognise the former as credible representatives of the latter? This is a very risky hypothesis. The evidence of which we are speaking are produced in every period by the level of connoisseurs—writers, critics, exegetists, commentators. This level differs from other levels of the public, for example, by virtue of the fact that it creates textually fixed acts of reading.

41Of course, the literary historian attempts in varying ways to find a way through the unitary and événement-centered nature of these pieces of evidence in order to see the supra-individual standards for reception of literature that lie hidden behind them. Sometimes he/she succeeds, and there are interesting results. However, the problem here is that those supra-individual standards still do not lead the literary scholar beyond the level of connoisseurs; he/she is still looking at a homogeneous space, exclusively populated by those who react to literary texts with their own texts. Further, even the reception code of the level of connoisseurs can by no means be easily perceived behind the veil of records of reading occurrences. Indeed, here, too—as in the world of texts—we are dealing both with “masterpiece” readings, which possess a substantial power to create norms, and which give rise to some style of reading, and with conventional readings, imitative, passively reproducing sanctified readings. However, among readings by connoisseurs, the most readily noticeable for the historian—and the most interesting—are those that are marked by a relatively high degree of dissidence from stereotypes of reception. Indeed, they often are of a clearly competitive or polemic character in relation to other readings. They are oriented toward experiment and revisionism. The evidences that speak of these draw the attention of the scholar, above all, to themselves, to their meaning and individual importance. However, it is only to a lesser degree that they give information about reading codes that are supported within some collectivity of readers.

42Does this all, thus, mean that a history of receivers, as it were contrary to its nature, must be conducted mainly as a history of the generals of reading?

43This conclusion would, doubtless, provoke energetic opposition on the part of the majority of advocates of “literary history from the reader’s perspective”. Today their interest is increasingly frequently directed toward practices of reading that are in many respects opposed to that general-centered focus, and particularly toward a school-focused reception of literature. That reception is not silent either: it leaves behind diversified pieces of textual evidence, and that even in vast numbers. The problem is, though, that they have no importance as a fixing of particular reading events or of reader individualities, but rather to the degree that they are serial and repeatable, they are relativised not in terms of an individual, but in terms of an institutional subject—a School. Teaching at school is, certainly, a basic mechanism for stabilizing a literary tradition’s canon, a mechanism serving a given public (and served by that public). The norms of reading that it imposes create the most widely promulgated system of reading—and for the majority of readers the only accessible one. It is the base system: all others are shaped in relation to it. Therefore, when a literary historian looks at evidences of elite, innovative, or heretical readings, generally he/she is dealing with undertakings for which the negative reference system is constituted by the petrified models and methods of a school reception.

44It appears that the reading of connoisseurs and the school reading set out two polar possibilities within the history of reception and receivers, when this history is treated as part of literary history. The space between them holds all other variants of reader activity—about which the literary historian at present cannot say much. Perhaps he/she can get to these activities by round-about routes—via indirect pieces of evidence. The discipline that the literary historian practices here is not yet sufficiently ready even to make an inventory of such evidence, and, for the moment, the question arises whether he/she is able to interpret them satisfactorily.

Notes